Kerim's Triptych ❧ Apotheosis, Male Flight, Raindrops

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For this, the first Triptych issue of 2025, I thought I'd change the title format. I'm moving away from simply listing the date, as I have been doing since the newsletter started in 2023, to a list of three keywords: one for each of the three links in the newsletter. I think this will make each issue feel more unique, and it will also make it easier to find older stories when browsing the archives.

🍾Happy New Year!🥂

1️⃣ Apotheosis

I finished Anna Della Subin's wonderful 2021 book, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, just in time for the new year. If the title sounds familiar that is because I had mentioned it when sharing her review of Marshall Sahlins's book on metahumans back in June. It is an ambitious, sprawling book that spans history and geography. The official marketing blurb does a good job of succinctly describing it:

From nationalist uprisings in India to Nigerien spirit possession cults, Anna Della Subin explores how deification has been a means of defiance for colonized peoples. Conversely, we see how Columbus, Cortés, and other white explorers amplified stories of their godhood to justify their dominion over native peoples, setting into motion the currents of racism and exclusion that have plagued the New World ever since they touched its shores.

Although I greatly appreciated how Subin approaches these themes of race, colonialism, and godhood, I felt the book was strongest when she was able to stay a bit longer with the stories of individual people. Not because I craved insight into the psychology of these human gods and their worshipers, but because the biographies were often genuinely fascinating on their on right.

Annie Besant, for instance, seemed worth a book of her own. When she was young, she had been a socialist and fighter for women's reproductive rights, she then became a theosophist, renouncing politics (and reproductive rights), before becoming an advocate for Indian home rule and a leading member of the Congress Party. But it was her role in raising Jiddu Krishnamurti as a living god that is especially important to Subin's story: one of the few examples in the book of a white person promoting a "native" as a god, rather than the other way around.

2️⃣ Male Flight

Celeste Davis argues that none of the popular explanations for why fewer men are going to college can explain why things are changing at this particular moment, since many of these factors (such as the ability of men to earn more than women without a college degree) have been true for some time. Instead, she offers an alternative hypothesis: male flight.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Her first example is from Anne Lincoln, who did research on white flight from veterinary schools:

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment."

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

She also shares this, about college recruitment, from Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

I think she is on to something. I would just add that I think this tipping point would have come much sooner if it had not been for the GI Bill, which sent a huge number of (male) veterans to college after World War II. As I understand it, women had been making great inroads into higher education during the war years.

3️⃣ Raindrops

"Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up" with River Runner, a web app that makes a little fly-through video for you showing you the path of that raindrop as it rolls down mountains, enters a river, and heads out to sea. Endlessly entertaining.

Endnote

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